Bain & Company’s latest gaming report reveals a fundamental shift that every brand should understand. Great gameplay is no longer enough. It’s just the start.
The multi-billion dollar gaming market is being reshaped by three key forces – users demanding social experiences, developers embracing new models, and brands finding unprecedented opportunities in virtual worlds.
Here’s what this means for your marketing strategy.
1. Prioritize creative, social, and community-focused mechanics.
Players who prefer platform-style games rank customization and playing with friends as highly as gameplay; graphics are secondary.
This represents a significant shift in what drives gaming success. While traditional AAA studios continue investing millions in high-fidelity graphics, players most highly value social, creative elements, and gameplay.
What does this mean for brands?
- Community over polish: Brands should prioritize experiences that enable social interaction and user creativity over high-production value activations.
- Authentic integration: In platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft, success comes from enabling player expression, not interrupting it.
The data backs this up. Young people aged between 2 and 17 are 20% more likely than gamers aged 35 and older to prefer playing the shortlist of games that are most popular among their peers.
These aren’t just games anymore – they’re cultural hubs.
2. User-generated content wins out as platform economies grow.
About 80% of gamers in Bain’s 2024 survey said they had played a game featuring player-made levels, modes, or items. In this year’s survey, almost half of game content creators reported spending more time creating than they did last year.
This shift mirrors what’s happening across all media: YouTube led all media companies in TV viewing time in May, the number of musical artists on Spotify earning more than $100,000 annually has roughly tripled since 2017, and Substack increased its paid subscriptions from 3 million in early 2024 to 5 million about a year later.
Gaming platforms are building a new creative economy, where users aren’t just consuming content; they’re building entire worlds, experiences, and communities.
3. Build multi-channel ecosystems not games.
Around a quarter of gamers’ time spent consuming other media is focused on engaging with game-related IP.
Increasingly, gamers and fans are falling in love with universes, stories, and characters rather than the entertainment format itself, fueling cross-format success. Over the six months following the release of an adapted movie or TV series, the number of average concurrent players of the original game increases by 45% on average.
How does this impact your strategy?
- Think ecosystem, not campaign: Gaming IP creates sustained engagement across multiple touchpoints.
- Quality matters: High-quality cross-media experiences drive meaningful engagement back to the core platform.
- Cross-platform opportunities: Successful gaming franchises create opportunities across film, TV, merchandise, and live events.
Key takeaways
1. Embrace community and platform-first thinking.
Move beyond traditional campaign thinking. The winning platforms and experiences are those that enable community, creation, and social interaction. Your brand activations should enhance these behaviors, not interrupt them.
2. Work with the creator economy.
The most successful platform experiences come from empowering users to create, not just consume. Look for opportunities to provide tools, resources, or inspiration that enables user-generated content around your brand.
3. Plan for cultural moments.
Major gaming releases like GTA VI should receive the same strategic planning as the Super Bowl or Olympics. Gaming is one of the strongest cultural currencies among Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
4. Quality over quantity across channels and media.
If you’re extending into gaming-adjacent content or partnerships, invest in quality. Leading companies only pursue new formats that fit the brand and avoid overextending.
Conclusion
The gaming landscape has fundamentally shifted from a product-focused industry to a platform and community-driven ecosystem. For brands, this creates both unprecedented opportunities and new requirements for success. The question isn’t whether to engage with gaming platforms, but how to do so authentically within these community-driven environments. The platform revolution is here. The brands that understand and adapt to these new dynamics will capture the attention and loyalty of the next generation of consumers.
